Think about what Aleksandr Solzhenitsnyn accomplished. Did he erode the legitimacy of the Soviet state by popping caps in a few Red Army soldiers? No.
Not everyone can write with the brilliant insight and emotion of Solzhenitsyn, but we can each play our part. The only unacceptable response is to do nothing, or to “curse, cringe, and obey”...
by the time that AS was published, the gulag system and tyranny were in place for how many decades...five? And how many innocents were tortured and murdered in that fifty odd years. Millions! And even more after piblication. I’d say that was a bit late! The intent today is to prevent the disaster that AS wrote about after the fact and to not have millions of Americans suffer the same fate by acting early. AS did great work, but the real efforts to prevent tyranny should have been done decades earlier. Do you recall AS’s qoute about how their hearts burned that they had not acted violently toward the secret police each time they knocked on the door of an apt and behind it weren’t men armed with shovels, axes etc. and that they should have instilled fear in the secret police that each night they went to do the round ups they never knew if they’d live to see their family in the morning. AS was not as passive as your post implies! *this sent from phone, so can’t quote AS exactly. maybe another freeper can help*
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”